4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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actuals
the result of something which Cassirer notes about the thinking of oral
peoples. “By a sudden metamorphosis everything may be turned into
everything. [There is] the deep conviction of a fundamental and indelible
solidarity of life that bridges over the multiplicity and variety of its
single forms.” 8 Everywhere there are overlaps, exchanges, and transformations
(like those, for example, in figure 2.1). Experience is not
segregated onto hierarchical planes. It is not that everything is the
same, but that all things are part of one wholeness, and that among
things unlimited exchanges and transformations are possible.
Some artists among us experience the way the Australians do. Artists
treat experience as something indivisible but exchangeable; as endlessly
varied but on the same plane; as here and now but other-worldly.
It is this hard-to-talk-about-in-our-language thing that Lévi-Strauss
means when he says that
there are still zones in which savage thought, like savage species, is
relatively protected. This is the case of art. . . . Savage thought is definable
both by a consuming symbolic ambition such as humanity has
never again seen rivaled, and by scrupulous attention directed entirely
towards the concrete, and finally by the implicit conviction that these
two attitudes are but one.
(Lévi-Strauss 1966: 219–20)
From here it is just a short step to understanding actualizing.
Figure 2.1